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The DSR Indie Wrestling Watch Guide: October 2026

How to Watch, WrestlingJenny CatlinComment

Spooky Season is officially upon us, wrestling fans. It’s a glorious season to be a part of an industry that thrives on unnerving and sometimes terrifying hyperbole. This month, storylines are splattered with extra blood and gore. October indies have it all: jump scares, hidden identities, masks, gimmicks, and general fear.

As a lifelong and year-round spooky girl, I’ll be the first to tell you, no one needs permission to commune with the dark side, but Halloween sure gives us a fun reason to be a little extra about it. This month’s Indie How to Watch guide leans all the way into the season too, highlighting 13 featured shows with an intentional seasonal hook, followed by a regional roundup for anyone who wants more wrestling than one human being could reasonably watch.

Programming note: Streaming details are listed where they’ve been announced. Smaller promotions often add a live feed or VOD option late, so anything marked TBD is worth checking again the week of the show.


New Texas Pro: Texas Contenders Series #69: Trick or Treat

Oct. 1 | Houston, Texas | Watch live on IWTV

New Texas storms into October by giving its prospect-heavy Contenders Series the Halloween treatment. Four matches have been announced, including Alexia Ivy vs. Kitti Hisatomi, Danny King vs. Buzzsaw Samuels, and Rudy Garza vs. Marvelous Mack. The match with the highest obvious stakes is Pac Ortega vs. Jak Calloway, another round in their Best-of-Five Series. TCS is a highly competitive promotion built around wrestlers trying to move up the New Texas pecking order, so it’s a great place to find people who may be much harder to see on an indie card a year from now.

Hoodslam × SlamTown: DOOMSLAM

Oct. 2 | Oakland, Calif. | Expected on TrillerTV+

Dirt Sheet Radio’s feature promotion for September, Hoodslam doesn’t really need Halloween to get weird. It already feels like a wrestling show broke into a nightclub after midnight and nobody bothered to call security before everyone morphed into shadow people. DOOMSLAM, however, brings the worlds of Hoodslam and SlamTown together at Oakland’s Crybaby for an adults-only show featuring a who's who line-up of the region's most electrifying talent, including the Stoner Bros, KEiTA, Sheikah, Mylo, Mike Rayne, Cereal Man, Lara and Anton. No individual matches have been announced yet, but with Hoodslam, the characters and whatever lunacy connects the matches are likely to be half the attraction anyway. Hoodslam’s current shows stream on TrillerTV+; the specific DOOMSLAM stream hadn’t been posted as of Sept. 30.

ATTACK! Pro Wrestling: Goosebumps 11

Oct. 24–25 | Cardiff, Wales & Bristol, England | Watch on ATTACK!’s Patreon

ATTACK! doesn’t just slap a pumpkin on the poster and call it Halloween. It commits. Goosebumps is the promotion’s annual Halloween weekend, which pairs naturally with a company already built around ridiculous characters, elaborate costumes, and wrestling that can veer from genuinely great to completely unhinged in a matter of minutes. This year has another reason to watch: Goosebumps 11 will celebrate 20 years of Mark Andrews’ in-ring career across two nights, Oct. 24 in Cardiff and Oct. 25 in Bristol.

The card is still in development, but ATTACK! has called it its biggest Halloween party yet. The promotion currently posts complete events through its Patreon, where recent 2026 shows and earlier editions of Goosebumps are already available, so viewers outside the UK should be able to catch the weekend on VOD.

PPW: House of Spells

Oct. 10 | Slatington, Pa. | Watch on YouTube

Pennsylvania Premiere Wrestling has gone with the beautifully basic with House of Spells for its October show. PPW is still rolling out the card, so there aren’t enough confirmed matches yet to hype anything beyond the event itself, but the promotion has already added it to its October schedule and is advertising match announcements through its site and social channels. The upside for anyone outside Pennsylvania is accessibility: PPW directs viewers to its YouTube channel to watch its events, making this one of the easier regional promotions to sample without first figuring out which wrestling streaming service acquired it six months ago.

EWF: Halloween Brutal 2026*

Oct. 10 | Porto Alegre, Brazil | Watch on EWF’s YouTube channel

Brazil’s Evolution Wrestling Force has been running Halloween Brutal long enough to have defined what “brutal” means here. The 2026 card hasn’t been announced yet, but the 2024 edition included a no-rules match and ended with Ryan O Patrão defending the EWF World Championship against KaoZ in a casket match. EWF’s YouTube has deep archives for international viewers: channel members can access recent complete events, older shows eventually become free, and individual matches are regularly released at no charge. Last year’s Halloween Brutal is available there in full, so there’s plenty of homework while the new card fills in.

* This one is in Portuguese, but if you, like me, are tragically monolingual, don’t let that turn you off to EWF. You can get everything in admittedly not great YouTube translation, but this is a really physical company; you won't necessarily miss out if you don’t subtitle.

JCW: A Nightmare in Bergen County (Jersey Championship Wrestling, not to be confused with Juggalo Championship Wrestling)

Oct. 18 | Ridgefield Park, N.J. | Watch live on TrillerTV+

JCW has two matches announced already, and both fit comfortably under the heading “matches you might watch between fingers with your hands over your eyes.” Long-standing rivals Bear Bronson faces Conor Claxton, while Charles Mason gets Gabby Forza. Kylie Alexa, SLADE and Sloane Jacobs are in for the show, though matches haven’t been announced. JCW’s current incarnation has become pretty adept at mixing strange recurring characters with wrestlers who could turn a match into a bar fight with very little encouragement, making A Nightmare in Bergen County one of the stronger actual wrestling cards in the Halloween pile. Better yet, it's already listed as a live TrillerTV stream.

MCW Pro Wrestling: Monster Mash

Oct. 24 | Joppa, Md. | Full-event viewing available through MCW online

Not everybody needs to bleed into a pumpkin to make the season festive. MCW’s Monster Mash is the family-friendly version of Halloween wrestling, with trick-or-treat stations, costumes, giveaways, meet-and-greets, and nine matches promised for the main card. Students from the MCW Training Center will also get preliminary “Breakthrough” matches before the main card. Specific pairings haven’t been announced, but MCW has been around since 1998 and still works in the classic regional-indie model: lots of matches, recognizable local regulars, and a show parents can bring kids to without having to explain the difference between razor wire and barbed wire afterward. MCW makes full events available online, including on YouTube.

UK Wrestling: Hallowed Ground, Nowhere to Run

Oct. 24 | Batley, England | Live worldwide on StagePlayer+ and YouTube membership

Sure, there’s something to be said for subtlety, but UK Wrestling isn’t particularly interested in listening. Every damn match happens inside a 15-foot steel cage. Hallowed Ground: Nowhere to Run will run entirely inside the cage, regardless of who winds up on the final card. The promotion hasn’t announced enough matchups yet to single out a headliner, but the stipulation itself makes this one of October’s easiest recommendations because there’s no wondering whether the Halloween name actually means anything once the bell rings. It’s also one of the easiest international viewing options: UKW says the entire show will air live worldwide on StagePlayer+ PPV and through its Level 2 YouTube membership.

Pro Wrestling Action: Monster Mash 4

Oct. 25 | Deltona, Fla. | Watch through PWA’s YouTube channel

Monster Mash 4 is another family-friendly option, complete with a costume contest and PWA’s brightly colored, comic-book-heavy presentation. As with most of these shows here, the card is still coming together, although Saieve Al-Sabah currently holds the All-Star Championship and Shelly Benson and Nick Turner are the inaugural Dynamic Duos Tag Team champions, giving the promotion a few established pieces to build the show around. Nothing’s been announced to suggest those titles will be defended, so don’t pencil those matches in yet, but, you know, it’s possible. PWA posts its wrestling through its official YouTube channel, though an Oct. 25 live stream hasn’t been posted yet.

 

GCW: Shotzi Blackheart’s Drive-In From Hell

Oct. 25 | Grindstone, Pa.g | Watch live on TrillerTV+

Professional wrestling at an actual drive-in followed by horror movies is the kind of idea that makes my own little black heart happy. Shotzi Blackheart (Naturally) hosts GCW’s Drive-In From Hell. The current roster makes the concept even better: Hallowicked, Frightmare, and Beastman are joined by Lio Rush, Megan Bayne, and Priscilla Kelly. Individual pairings still haven’t been announced, but this doesn’t need much salesmanship beyond “GCW at a drive-in on Halloween weekend.” Unlike a lot of the month’s smaller spooky shows, this one already has a confirmed national option and will stream live on TrillerTV+.

Labor of Love: Mischief Night Mayhem 5

Oct. 30 | Philadelphia, Pa. | Watch online via YouTube

A lot of October events focus on the the spirit of the holiday, but Labor of Love has actual stakes attached to its fifth Mischief Night Mayhem. The Outfielders, Shea McCoy and Weber Hatfield, face Citywide Street Gang’s Martin Hughes and Tom LaRosa in the Commonwealth Cup final, with the vacant LOL Philly Philly Tag Team Championship also on the line. Matt Mako will defend the Citywide Championship against Se Morrigan. That gives the show more to work with than Halloween costumes and a spooky font: there’s a tournament conclusion and two championships at the center of the announced card. The event is listed as an online stream through YouTube, with more matches still to come.

BZW: Scary Banger

Oct. 31 | Lyon, France | Watch on BZW+

Banger Zone Wrestling gets one of the month’s biggest visiting names in Jeff Cobb, who’s already announced for a BZW Championship match against whoever holds the belt by Halloween night. Calypso vs. Mila Smidt is also official. That’s enough to make Scary Banger more than an international curiosity, particularly for anyone who hasn’t spent much time with the growing French wrestling scene. The show takes place Halloween night at Salle de la Ficelle in Lyon and is already listed as an upcoming release on BZW+, the promotion’s subscription streaming service, so viewers outside France won’t need a plane ticket to find out what French wrestling looks like with the lights turned down.

IWA: Hallowicked

Oct. 31 | Sutherland, New South Wales, Australia | Watch later on YouTube

Halloween actually falls on show night for International Wrestling Australia, which will run Hallowicked at Club on East in Sutherland. The promotion hasn’t announced the card yet, so this is more of a bookmark than a match-specific recommendation for now. IWA has been running in Australia for decades, though, and its October branding tends to give the promotion room to lean harder into characters and spectacle than on an ordinary card. International viewers should eventually be able to see the results themselves: IWA says it regularly uploads both individual matches and complete event footage to its official YouTube channel.


Around the regions

A few more October options, from tiny local Halloween cards to national indie anchors. A lot of these smaller promotions announce streams late, so TBD really does mean check the week of the show again.

This is not even close to an exhaustive list for events or streaming options. As always, check out ThrillerTV and IWTV for streaming options.

Please remember that the best way to keep your favorite independent promotions alive and thriving is to go to the shows, buy the merch, and spread the word.

Northeast

Oct. 18: Limitless Wrestling: Fresh Blood '26 (Portland, ME). JTG is advertised alongside Donovan Dijak, Maggie Lee, Manders and Thomas Shire. It isn't a Halloween gimmick show, but it's a strong wrestling-first option mid-month. Watch: IWTV archive; event stream TBD.

Oct. 24: Focus Pro Wrestling: The World in My Hands (Cambridge, MA). An afternoon show at Sonia makes this half of an easy Cambridge wrestling doubleheader for anyone planning to stay for the violence later that night. Watch: TBD.

Oct. 24: ICW No Holds Barred (Cambridge, MA). Same building, much rougher half of the doubleheader. If the Halloween mood you want is 'somebody may need stitches,' this is the option. Watch: check ICW's current streaming listing closer to bell time.

Midwest

Oct. 10: HAW: Never Surrender (LeClaire, IA). Leyla Hirsch and Masha Slamovich are among the names advertised, giving this one more outside-name juice than a lot of regional cards. Watch: TrillerTV PPV.

Oct. 23: AAW: Bourbon Street Massacre (Merrionette Park, IL). AAW returns to 115 Bourbon Street with a title that understands the assignment. The card is still filling in. Watch: TBD.

Oct. 23: New Edge Pro Wrestling: The Omen (Hazel Park, MI). The name does some October work on its own, and the announced card includes Marco Modello vs. Jake Omen and STXRM Garcon vs. Noelle Summit. Watch: YouTube bonus matches announced; full-show stream TBD.

Oct. 24: Pro Wrestling King: Halloweenmania XIII (South Bend, IN). Thirteen Halloweenmanias is enough to qualify as a tradition, and PWK gives northern Indiana its own annual spooky-season card. Watch: no confirmed stream is listed yet.

Oct. 24: NWF (Covington, KY). A Halloween Massacre Match gives this one a real seasonal hook instead of just an October date. Watch: check NWF's official channels; stream TBD.

Oct. 31: We Love Wrestling: Halloween Wrestleparty 2 (West Allis, WI). The Wisconsin deathmatch-heavy promotion lands on Halloween itself, which feels about right. Watch: WLW's recent full events are available on IWTV; exact release timing for Wrestleparty 2 TBD.

South

Oct. 2: The Establishment Wrestling: Monster Smash II (Casselberry, FL). TEW opens the month at EMPIRE Arena with Monster Smash II -- 'Smash,' not 'Mash' -- and gets Florida into the Halloween business immediately. Watch: TEW has streamed recent EMPIRE Arena shows live on YouTube; exact Oct. 2 feed TBD.

Oct. 3: Coastal Championship Wrestling (Miami, FL). CCW is a reliable Florida regional option and has been making major shows easy to find online. Watch: recent events have streamed free on YouTube.

Oct. 3: MLW Slaughterhouse 2026 (Atlanta, GA). MLW is the biggest promotion in this roundup, but a Fusion taping called Slaughterhouse belongs in October. The event is now listed for Atlanta after originally being announced for Philadelphia. Watch: footage airs through MLW Fusion on YouTube, VEEPS and beIN Sports; this is a taping, so don't assume the full event airs live that night.

Oct. 9: ProSouth Wrestling (Piedmont, AL). ProSouth runs often enough that it feels less like a monthly supercard promotion and more like a real weekly wrestling ecosystem. Watch: YouTube, including live/member programming.

Oct. 10: Viral Pro Wrestling (Augusta, GA). One of Georgia's better-established regional promotions, and an easy add for anyone trying to follow the Southeast beyond the biggest brands. Watch: TBD.

Oct. 11: Deep South Wrestling (Atlanta, GA). Yes, Deep South Wrestling is still around. That alone makes it a fun regional note for readers who remember the name from another era. Watch: TBD.

Oct. 24: Brawloween III: La Noche De Miedo (Lake Mary, FL). The title translates to 'The Night of Fear,' which is really all the justification an October roundup needs. Watch: no confirmed stream yet.

Oct. 24: AW: Halloween Massacre (Kissimmee, FL). Another Florida card that isn't being subtle about the holiday, this one runs at Sun on the Beach. Watch: no confirmed stream yet.

Oct. 24: Wrestling Revolver (Nashville, TN). Revolver is the larger-scale option in the South roundup, with a deeper traveling roster and a more national indie footprint. Watch: TrillerTV+.

Texas

Oct. 15: Dragonslayer Pro Wrestling (Fort Worth, TX). A smaller Texas stop that helps the roundup get past the usual Houston-Austin axis. Watch: WSN Plus has carried Dragonslayer programming.

Oct. 25: River City Wrestling (San Antonio, TX). A long-running San Antonio promotion and a solid regional anchor for the back half of the month. Watch: TBD.

Oct. 30: New Texas Pro: 8-Year Anniversary (Houston, TX). Shibata, Bryan Keith and Kylie Rae are among the advertised names, making this one of the easiest non-Halloween cards to recommend on name value alone. Watch: IWTV and YouTube are listed for the event.

West / Mountain

Oct. 25: Primos Premier Pro Wrestling (Denver, CO). Primos is back at the Roxy, giving the Mountain West a real October stop without pretending every region has 10 major indies running every weekend. Watch: TrillerTV+ carries Primos programming.

Oct. 31: Crimson Crown Wrestling: Festival of the Dead (California). This is the CCW in question -- Crimson Crown, not Coastal Championship Wrestling -- and its whole 'supreme violence' identity is already built for Halloween. Watch: Crimson Crown has an official YouTube channel and recent full events on IWTV; exact Festival of the Dead distribution TBD.

Have a show you think should be listed?

Send SHOW NAME, HQ POSTER, FULL CARD, LINK TO EVENT to DSRHowToWatch@gmail.com

#Indys4life


For more promotions and ways to stream local, regional, and international independent wrestling, check out the September and August Guide.


Jenny Catlin is a writer from the Square States, covering racing, pop culture, professional wrestling, country and western, and glam metal music, obsession, sex, pornography, the real working class, indie press, and other obsessions. An award-winning essayist, she is a contributing writer at The Athletic and Denver-based Denverse Magazine. Find her on Substack and Instagram.

Hoodslam: Like a Comic Book Variety Show Where Wrestling Matters

WrestlingJenny CatlinComment

I like a great story as much as a great match, and Hoodslam is another promotion putting narrative in the center of the ring. For 16 years, the Oakland company has defied the notion that indie wrestling should look and feel like a small-scale version of the major televised productions. Daniel Torch, who currently wrestles there as Daniel T, knows that better than most. I got a chance to talk with him about his work with the bombastic Bay Area promotion, how it has changed over the years, and why some of its most devoted fans aren't really wrestling fans anywhere else.

DARK Sheik, Hoodslam’s founder, sets up an opponent for a piledriver during a Hoodslam show

Dark Sheik founded Hoodslam in 2010, initially gathering wrestlers at Victory Warehouse for shows built around creative freedom and adult content.  She was interested in ideas that didn't fit in with other promotions. Hoodslam quickly outgrew the Victory Warehouse and moved into the Oakland Metro Opera House, becoming part of the city's vibrant First Friday night life. Wrestling shared space with drinking, smoking, burlesque, and sideshow performances, plenty of profanity, and lots of oddball characters.

That reputation still follows Hoodslam, but veteran wrestler Daniel Torch says thinking of it only that way misses what the promotion has become. Torch has been wrestling around Northern California for more than fifteen years, and he’s followed Hoodslam from pretty much the start. Initially, he stayed on the outskirts. Straight edge and quiet, he was uninterested in smoky rooms packed with drunk folks. That version of Hoodslam didn't feel like his natural habitat. However, a venue change, which brought with it a no-smoking-inside policy, convinced him to take a closer look.

His first real foothold as a character came when Hoodslam needed somebody for a funeral. Torch remembers being told, “You're an emo kid; you love the dark. So he showed up, did the segment, and got invited back for three more dates. Soon he found himself alongside Rob Hands and Brooke Havoc during one of Hoodslam's periodic storyline resets. Dark Sheik's creative direction for him was less about inventing a wrestling gimmick than stripping one away. Stop asking how Torch the Wrestler would behave, essentially, and react more like Daniel actually would.

Promotional flyer for a 2025 event featuring Mayor Von Eerie and Brooke Havok.

That took some adjustment. Torch was accustomed to independent wrestling shows where the assignment was largely to go out and have a great match. He told me the match still matters, but Hoodslam might instead give him several story points that needed to land on a particular night because they mattered next month. Sometimes the wrestling is the center of the segment. Sometimes it's the mechanism that propels the storyline. More often than not, it’s both.

“Hoodslam has a Hoodslam crowd,” Torch said. Its fans will follow the story wherever it goes because they’re already invested in the characters and the world around them. Torch describes Hoodslam as “very comic book,” and that world has only become more elaborate over time.

Hoodslam's current mythology centers on Slamtown, an alternate reality populated by distorted versions of existing Hoodslam characters. Anton Voorhees claims to remember another world, and Brooke Havoc becomes a graffiti-tagging hoodlum. Dave Reckoning runs a dungeon that’s also a bar. Richard Shhhnary tended the library. Dr. Mehl and Prisoner 420 eventually recovered memories, which allowed the pair to re-identify themselves as the Stoner Brothers. Other characters have slowly begun to realize something about their reality is distorted, with some catching glimpses of their past lives.

The current municipal government is one of SlamTown's major factions: Mayor Von Eerie, her SlamTown Justice Security Force, and Daniel T (Torch’s SlamTown identity), a perpetually overworked assistant to the mayor. Hoodslam’s site describes  Daniel T as overworked and asks that you please be nice to him.

In that same comic-book style, people die, return, change identities and slip into alternate timelines. They also wrestle, occasionally because a supernatural or bureaucratic problem requires the kind of solution that can only be delivered with a powerbomb. The absurdity works because Hoodslam hasn't abandoned the wrestling underneath it.

Torch has watched the promotion move through several phases. The earliest warehouse shows were essentially wrestlers experimenting and entertaining themselves. Burlesque and sideshow acts later became part of the attraction. Torch says those elements helped bring people through the door, but the wrestling is what kept them around. Over time, Hoodslam itself became the draw: “The wrestling and the Hoodslam is why people are coming back,” Torch said.

The promotion has built enough loyalty around its characters and stories that the old party atmosphere no longer has to carry the show. In fact, some of Hoodslam’s regulars barely seem to belong to the larger wrestling ecosystem at all.

Fans crowding the ring during a live show in Oakland

Torch says he routinely meets people who don’t follow wrestling but know Hoodslam, and he sees fans at Hoodslam shows who never turn up anywhere else. Some are wrestling fans who happen to love Hoodslam. Others are simply Hoodslam fans. For them, Hoodslam isn’t a gateway to wrestling. It’s the destination.  Torch describes that last group as “I just go to Hoodslam” fans.

For a promotion whose long-term slogan is “Fuck the Fans,” it has built an unusually committed collection of them, making it a particularly good recommendation for people who like the idea of wrestling more than they like conventional wrestling television. The obvious audience includes fans of comics, anime, horror, queer performance, punk, and DIY art. It's for people who like elaborate characters and stories and are willing and eager to set realism aside. The promotion has always made space for queer and trans performers, intergender wrestling, and characters who would have been flattened into stereotypes or simply excluded in more traditional environments.

The overworked assistant to the mayor of SlamTown, Daniel T

This is a good promotion for that one friend who’s decided wrestling isn't for them. Torch says Hoodslam sometimes has to approach its audience differently because not everybody in the room is a wrestling fan. A spectacular sequence of moves means less if the viewer has no reason to care who's doing them. That's true throughout wrestling, but especially at Hoodslam.

“If they can identify with the character,” Torch said, “they're gonna attach to that faster than the wrestling.”

Fans who want their indie wrestling built primarily around great matches, recognizable feuds, and familiar wrestling logic may find Hoodslam a little hard to settle into. Hoodslam can deliver excellent wrestling, and often does, but it doesn't pretend that every match exists primarily to produce the best possible star rating. Sure, sometimes the point is the physical fight. Other times, though, the point is a man dressed as Sherlock Holmes needs to beat somebody into a position where he can interrogate him with a magnifying glass. Torch has done that too. Plenty of wrestling companies would consider that a problem, but at Hoodslam it's the show.

 

Hoodslam: How to Watch

Hoodslam/SlamTown: Revelations 8:28

When: Sept. 1, 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT

Where: Continental Club, Oakland, California

Where to watch: TrillerTV+

Revelations 8:28 was held Aug. 28 at the Continental Club before its Sept. 1 streaming premiere. TrillerTV lists Anton Voorhees, Lara Frazier, Ricky and Scotty Stoner, KEiTA, Dave Reckoning, Cooper Contra Costa, Sheikah, Daniel T, Sheriff Boone, Deputy Regular Rob and SlamTown Justice among the featured performers.

Revelations 8:28 is a good entry point for newcomers because a lot of the story revolves around characters trying to understand SlamTown itself.

Wrestle Detective Cooper Contra Costa has been following a progression of increasingly strange leads. First, Anton Voorhees showed up claiming to come from another world. The Stoner Brothers recovered memories of previous identities. Sheikah wrote a banned book whose readers supposedly went mad after finishing it and were committed to the Asylum. In typical politician style, former Mayor Mike Rayne seems to know more than he’s letting on.  

All those clues point to the same mystery. Residents remember another reality, and one word keeps surfacing from the alternate plane: Hoodslam.


Jenny Catlin is a writer from the Square States, covering racing, pop culture, professional wrestling, country and western, and glam metal music, obsession, sex, pornography, the real working class, indie press, and other obsessions. An award-winning essayist, she is a contributing writer at The Athletic and Denver-based Denverse Magazine. Find her on Substack and Instagram.